


you couldn't have loved me better

by nutellamuffin



Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, I have a lot of feelings about them, Mutual Pining, POV Caspian (Narnia), and are we not going to talk about caspian’s ptsd, and sometimes they don’t have to kiss for you to know they’re in love, and they need each other, ignoring canon (again), or the fact that he’s been alone for nearly his whole life, they are the bromance of the century okay, they’re just two boys who grew up too fast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:41:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26974576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nutellamuffin/pseuds/nutellamuffin
Summary: or, peter and caspian, and belonging.
Relationships: Caspian/Peter Pevensie
Comments: 10
Kudos: 35





	you couldn't have loved me better

**Author's Note:**

> ok i have taken it upon myself to singlehandedly fix the caspeter tag because all i can find is peter/caspian/edmund and mpreg fics. enjoy your soft content. there is more to come.
> 
> title is from "already gone" by sleeping at last.
> 
> thank you to @MostlyFandomTrash for beta reading this. she sits through all my ramblings about these two dorks and supports me wholeheartedly as i do so, you're a real one.

from the moment he opened his eyes, caspian was taught to resent anything and everything outside of telmar. perhaps not  _ resent- _ or, maybe, not at first. his father’s gentle warnings, more of a guiding hand than a law. telling him to just  _ be careful. _ telling him that no one knew what was out there. telling him it wasn’t safe.

and in came miraz, seeing narnia as a chess board. how much he could dominate, how much he could profit. suddenly, the narnians were  _ savages _ , as he told caspian sternly. little, seven year old caspian, who didn't know any better. who had been told that his father and mother were sick and wanted nothing more than for caspian to look at miraz like a third parent.  _ they will hunt you down, _ he said,  _ they hate us, caspian. _ and they did hate them, the telmarines. but for all different reasons, as you could expect. 

and when caspian was running that night, barely eighteen, going on no food and energy, only from the sheer thrill of living; long since had the troops stopped following him, proclaiming him dead eventually after losing him in a bog. those damn horses were never fast enough anyways. 

he had never been good at processing things, and so he didn't try. he didn't think about the panic on cornelius' face when he woke him up a mere twenty minutes ago from that moment. he didn't think about how he told him that his own uncle wanted him dead. he didn't think about how he told him they would likely never see each other again. 

he didn't know where to go. barely eighteen, no food, no energy, no more thrill. just a sword in the dark and the clothes off his back. he had never travelled this far before, and his horse had run when he fell off of it.

the world was spinning. he hadn't known what to do. he reached into his pocket in a desperate attempt, blowing the horn as hard as he could before fainting in the mud. and when he'd awoken, he was in a cottage of a dwarf and a badger.  _ narnians _ . he had tried to kill one with a stick from the fire, he remembered- much less kill, rather than defend. and then he'd realized just how much his uncle had lied to him about. much deeper rooted in him than the lie that his parents had been sick.

and then someone answered his call.

and one of those someones was peter.

goddamn peter.

caspian had never really had  _ time  _ for . . . existential crises about his sexuality. he'd always been sheltered from the world, due to his uncle not wanting him to know anything or change anything in rallying the troops against him, and so he hadn't really got out much. and honestly, everyone he trained with was about forty or older, so he didn't really experience  _ that _ much attraction.

until peter. whatever it was, caspian was ignoring it. and he would keep ignoring it until it went away. but it didn't. which he supposed led him here, three nights after they’d won, feeling as though he’d only lost.

* * *

caspian didn't like to feel pitied. he didn't, that was a basic fact, one that couldn't be budged or given exceptions or anything of the like. anyone who'd ever loved him could tell you that much. (it wasn't many people, who loved him intimately. caspian could count them on one hand. on less than five fingers.)

it didn't matter who was pitying him or why. pity stuck out on someone's face like a mosquito bite on your forehead, you could see it in their eyes; either a drooping sadness for those who were genuine, or an exhausted semi-glare for those who were fed up with it.

did they pity peter, he wondered, who everyone was whispering about? he’d heard the rumours. that aslan was going to decide that peter wasn’t coming back. (and susan, maybe. but people whispered less about susan. which confused caspian all the more, because out of all of them, susan was a mystery.)

they’d won. that was an unmovable fact. they’d won, and caspian had been crowned a mere three hours ago, and everyone around him was celebrating and cheering and drinking wine and eating and it was  _ too loud too loud too loud _ and why didn’t caspian feel  **_happy?_ **

he needed to get out. he needed to get away from the swaying bodies and the music and the lights and _the_ _noise the noise the noise_ and somehow he found himself sitting on a bench in the garden.

he had a glass in his hand. a glass full of wine, he noticed, when he looked down. a glass he’d barely touched. (he didn’t particularly hate wine. he just hated how fuzzy his head got. he hated how he suddenly didn’t know what he was saying. he hated how anyone seemed safe enough, and how anyone could take advantage of him in any way. he hated how wine lowered his guard without him telling it to.)

he put the wine glass on the ground beside the bench.

he was vaguely aware that he was staring at a spot of grass on the floor. maybe it was because he wasn’t staring at the patch specifically, he was just . . . looking. he must’ve leaned forward too much, because his crown fell off his head just in time for him to catch it; he didn’t put it back on. someone sat down beside him that made him look up from the gold, and he set the crown on the grass, too.

“i noticed you’d run,” peter said, twisting his own wine glass in his hands. he looked from the crown, to caspian, to the glass on the floor; to how it was barely touched, and set his own down, “as if someone was chasing you.”

had he? caspian couldn’t remember getting here. he just needed to get  _ out _ and it was too loud, and everything was moving, and then suddenly his crown fell off his head, and  _ peter. _

peter must’ve taken his silence as an answer, because he added, “they aren’t anymore, you know. you can relax.”

he wasn’t struggling for conversation. but caspian was,  _ aslan, _ caspian was. his tongue was limp in his mouth and he couldn’t form any words. he stared at that one spot on the grass before he decided he should be looking at peter, and he did, and the truth tumbled past his lips before he could stop it.

“i don’t quite know how to do that.”

peter carried the sweetest sadness in his eyes, caspian noticed once again, while looking at them in the dim lighting of the party- perhaps the sadness of a kingdom long lost, perhaps the sadness of a life lived in a world that had turned him to a myth- but he carried pity, too. and belonging. 

peter carried the sweetest sadness in his eyes, and it made it near impossible for caspian to resent the pity. he wanted to, he wanted to brush it off and leave, he wanted to talk to someone else who wouldn't pity him- or rather, he wanted to be able to  _ think  _ about doing those things. without feeling the guilt, twisting his stomach up in knots, churning and pulling and rooting him to his spot. all because of the way peter was looking at him. he couldn't resist to give in to the pity, to the empathy, which was a strange experience in and of itself.

he had never given into it before. (even when they'd been talking for hours and the light from the fire was dim, and everyone else was fast asleep on the forest floor, and peter would turn to look at him in the dark with those piercing blue eyes that caspian wanted to love but only saw pity in them, he couldn't handle it.)

“that’s alright. i don’t quite know how to do that, either.” peter tilted his head back to the sky, and caspian couldn’t see those eyes anymore, but he could still tell what they looked like. “at least, not here.”

_ (not here. _ what did that mean, truly, to peter? caspian could only wonder.)

“caspian.” out of the corner of his eye, caspian saw peter move his hand closer, before flexing it and keeping it right where it was; nudging him with his shoulder instead, “you know you’re not alone anymore, right? not when you have us. i’ll be there for you.”

**_i’ll be there for you._ ** like they had supposed to have been there for each other before then but hadn't been. like they had been supposed to meet for years, have already had this talk. what would that look like, he supposed? if caspian were an old friend? perhaps they would still stand here and talk for hours, that would be expected. but would they talk about different things? somehow, caspian thought that the conversation would be more or less the same. 

“i know.” caspian tried his best to put on his kingly smile, the smile that charmed the courts and queens, and brought down wars and walls between two emotional people. the smile that he'd been told put a twinkle in his eye, a sparkling in the darkness of the honey brown swirling into shadows. 

a kingly smile that he was near 100% certain that peter could see  _ right _ through.

because how couldn't he? they wore that same smile, caspian could tell. but he wasn’t wearing it now. no, right now, he was looking at caspian as if he were transparent, and peter could see every thought inside his head. (somewhere in his manic tornado of what this party had turned his thinking into, a thought crossed caspian’s mind that peter was quite like the wine. he made caspian want to spill his secrets. he was  _ intoxicating. _ at least, his eyes were. caspian didn’t know about the rest of him.)

“then why won’t you let us?”

caspian had become very good at hiding his feelings, he found. from being raised on lies to breathing them, trickling from his own lips and from others. and he wanted to lie to peter. he wanted to shut him off, toss up the curtain between them. throw his crown away to burn the bridge on which this conversation was built. he wanted to lie to him, it was second nature, and there were oh so many lies that were on his tongue, ready to be used. lies from  _ because it's alright _ to  _ because i don't need you. _

but he couldn't.

he went one, two, three times to open his mouth, never even getting to step one as he did so. stopping when he saw peter again. the way he was looking at him like caspian was something that needed saving, or better yet, something that  _ he _ wanted to save.

caspian wanted to lie to peter, but he couldn’t. so he did the only other thing he could think of. he looked back to the grass, and he told the truth.

“i don’t know.”

he felt as though peter could’ve said a million things that would’ve all been distinctly  _ peter _ , so much so that it would be as if he didn’t say anything at all. (maybe he’d tell caspian that it was okay to not know. maybe he’d tell him he didn’t know, either. maybe he’d offer him wine. maybe he’d tell him to look at the stars. maybe he’d say he was going to go back to the party.)

but he didn’t. peter did none of those things. instead, he tilted his head back to the sky again, and took caspian’s hand.

neither of them said anything after that.

* * *

caspian didn’t want to put his crown on. it weighed his head to the floor and yet it was so weightless, as if it was always meant to be there, and he didn’t know which made him feel worse. he stared down at the gold in his hands and tried to stop thinking so much, to just put it on and hold his head high and pretend that  _ just another caspian _ didn’t ring in his ears whenever he looked in the mirror.

but he felt like he was going to be sick, and so he exhaled shakily through his mouth and put the crown back on the velvet pedestal off the side of his bed. he hadn’t realized he was clenching his hands so tightly that his fingernails wore crescent moons into his palm, until there was a knock at the door, and he had to uncurl his fingers.

when it was peter behind his door, caspian almost wasn’t surprised. except for the fact that he was almost a hundred percent certain that he had better things to do. peter’s hand twitched by his side, and he wondered if he longed to take caspian’s own again the same way caspian did.

“i wanted to check on you.” he seemed like he was regretting his words as he was saying them, and caspian didn’t understand why. there was no harm in being honest. (except there was. there was  _ so _ much harm in being honest, that’s why caspian had lied his whole life, that’s why everyone around him had hid the truth for as long as they could.) at least, not for peter, there wasn’t.

caspian didn’t take peter’s hand. instead he wrung his own behind his back and wished life were simpler. “there’s not much to check on.”

maybe peter knew that. but it was like he was seeing peter for the first time, and there was that sweet sadness in peter's eyes; like he'd been through so much hurt but he didn't resent anyone for it.  _ like he blamed himself.  _

caspian knew that feeling. but it fit so well on peter, like it was meant to be there, like it had happened so often that if it  _ wasn't  _ there, that would be the strange part. it made caspian want to draw peter up into his arms and protect him from the world. perhaps the old narnia wasn't so wonderful if it had done this to the other, who was standing there with nothing but kindness and everlasting love for anyone who needed it.  _ that _ was the blind trust that caspian wished to see in everyone again. and that was the plain hurt that caspian wanted to steal away from him.

“i think there is, caspian.”

that sweet sadness in his eyes had made caspian swallow his lies. and with them, everything he had been taught. he was on his own now. no more lies to  ~~ kill him inside ~~ protect him. so why wasn't he afraid? he should be afraid. caspian was afraid of a lot of things, some he wouldn't dare admit. people didn't like kings who were afraid.

but oh, he was. he was afraid of losing his home to fire, he was afraid of crying at funerals when everyone was watching, he was afraid of the way he felt when he watched a sunrise. he was afraid of letting the ball of emotions inside his chest unravel and he was afraid of suffocating but he was not afraid of dying, death did not scare him.

yet he knew what he  _ should  _ be afraid of. he should be afraid of the way his heart skipped when peter looked at him like that, he should be afraid of how quickly he trusted him, he should be afraid of this man who made him  _ swallow all his lies like it was nothing. _ he should be afraid of peter. not because he was dangerous. because he was honest.

all caspian could think of to say was something like  _ and what is it that you think you know _ but peter didn’t deserve that, no one did. all the things that came to his mind which he never said piled on his tongue until it was weighed down to nothing in his mouth, and so he said nothing at all, stepping aside to let peter into his room.

peter stood stock still until caspian sat down on the edge of his bed, and so he followed, not wanting to be the odd one out. their legs were almost touching, caspian thought. perhaps that wasn’t big where peter came from. he banished the thought.

(no one  _ touched _ here. or maybe that was just caspian’s family. ever since miraz and prunaprismia became the only living relatives caspian had,  _ touching _ was unheard of. caspian never hugged his uncle. caspian never went  _ close _ to his uncle unless he told him to. maybe their legs almost touching wasn’t something big, but caspian wondered if it was allowed to be big to  _ him. _ )

by simply word association, (which caspian’s train of thought seemed to  _ love, _ ) caspian realized in a heart stopping moment that he didn’t  _ have _ a family anymore. if prunaprismia even counted, she hated him, and furthermore had fled when miraz was killed. he knew nothing of his cousin. he didn’t even know his name.

and by the fact that he had just then actually processed the death of his  ~~ last ~~ blood relative, everything else seemed to hit him at once. peter was talking to him, saying something that sounded like his name, but he couldn’t come up for air from the thought that was drowning him of the fact that he was  _ alone. _

if you thought about it, caspian had been alone since he was six years old, it was never like his uncle really cared about him. it was never like his aunt ever asked him how he was or if he missed his parents or if cornelius’ lessons were going well and it was never like he was given a chance to bounce back from losing everything in one night and it wasn’t like he was  _ ever going to have a family again _ and  **_oh._ **

peter.

peter, with his arms wrapped around him, trying to bring him back to the room he was in.

caspian blinked once, twice, and slowly moved his hands to rest on peter’s arms. peter nudged his cheek with his nose, making sure caspian was there enough to look back at him, and he almost couldn’t ignore the watery element to peter’s voice when he laughed then. quietly. tentatively.

“this is why i wanted to check on you,” he said gently, and despite the forced laugh a moment earlier, he gave no indication that he was joking. a long, heavy moment hung above their heads until peter spoke again.

“please talk to me.”

peter didn’t remove his arms, and so caspian didn’t drop his hands, and somewhere in his chest his heart hurt but he didn’t know why. so he didn’t think of it. caspian thought that peter and him never needed any words, maybe that’s why they spoke so little. maybe that’s why peter kept showing up at his door anyway. because he knew. even though caspian didn’t say anything.

maybe he needed caspian to put it into words, for once. and so he tried.

“i suppose i just didn’t realize that i . . .” caspian cleared his throat, dropping his hands to twist the fabric of his shirt around his fingers, “that i don’t really have a family anymore. and it never bothered me before. or- or maybe i just didn’t think about it.”

once peter was sure caspian was done, he admitted in a quiet voice, one you might use to soothe a spooked rabbit, “you have me- uh, us. you have us now.” and then, after a pause, in a voice that held a little more confidence, he repeated, “you have me now.”

he didn't feel pity. he expected to feel pitied, he expected the fleeting feeling of it to return from before. maybe that was why he trusted peter so easily, here and now. peter wasn't afraid to be raw, and vulnerable, and a shoulder to cry on. peter wasn't afraid to look at someone so invitingly and smile so genuinely. peter, it seemed, wasn't afraid to make caspian's heart stop.

because he did. and he was doing it now, with that look, that single look that seemed to be open arms all on their own. caspian felt as though he was drowning in peter's eyes. it was nicer than drowning in his own thoughts.

slowly, caspian turned, shifting a bit so peter wasn’t holding him so awkwardly. he let his body move on its own, because he couldn’t trust himself to know what to do, not when this was the first time someone had done anything similar to this in years. somehow his arms wrapped around peter’s waist and the other boy shifted accordingly with his own arms around caspian’s shoulders and  _ they fit together like puzzle pieces. _

what a strange feeling, to belong.

maybe they said something else. maybe caspian repeated peter’s own words back to him to make sure they were real, and maybe peter nodded and told him he didn’t have to bottle everything up inside, and maybe caspian let his head fall on peter’s shoulder, and maybe it was hours before either of them moved. or maybe it wasn’t. who’s to say?

all caspian knew was that being held by this man, right there and then and  _ safe _ and alone but not in the way that choked him, felt right. (were they men? barely.)

they were boys, tumbling down hills into velvet thrones before they were given a chance to shake the leaves out of their hair. they were boys who were never held up for anything other than what others wanted of them. they were boys, falling through dressing rooms and courts and balls, never given a chance to catch their breath.

and so caspian fell. he fell _hard._ and he handed his heart over to peter.


End file.
